A Time Line of the
History and Development of
Jung's Works and Theories
(1902-1935)
Gary V. Hartman

Foreword
This time-line resulted from my search for the fundamentals of Jung's
psychology: I wanted to discover for myself where Jung started and how he
got to that model of the psyche which we today call "Jungian Psychology."
In fact, my first Jungian paper bore the title, "Is There Such a Thing as
Jungian Psychology?"(1)

Jungian tradition holds that Jung evolved his psychology from Freud's
psychoanalysis. In the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Jung, Michael
Fordham describes Jung as a "Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who
founded analytical psychology, in some aspects a response to Sigmund
Freud's psychoanalysis." In the film "The Wisdom of the Dream," Stephen
Segaller is more blatant:
Professionally, Jung was following the lead of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese
originator of psychoanalysis and the study of the unconscious. Jung and
Freud first met in 1909 [sic!] . . . Jung was the pupil and Freud the master.

Complicating matters further, every Jungian has a different perspective on
that psychology. In the film, "Matter of Heart," three well-known
"Jungians" tell the listeners what they believe to have been Jung's primary
focus. Lilliane Frey-Rohn speaks of Jung's being interested in "the
super-natural food;" Barbara Hannah says that Jung was "above all,
interested in wholeness;" and Laurens Van der Post calls Jung an old
"African witchdoctor."(2) In the popular mind, Jungians deal with typology,
mythology, dreams, individuation, and the collective unconscious.

To answer the question of Jung's origins, I read Jung's writings
chronologically, in the order in which he had written them. Beginning with
his doctoral dissertation, "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called
Occult Phenomena," I read everything Jung wrote up to 1935, the date of his
lectures at the Tavistock Clinic.

Whenever I encountered a theory or what
looked as if it might have been a precursor of a theory, I took note of it.

Intertwined with my initial question concerning Jung's origins were others.
What fundamental aspects of his psychology did he arrive at in the decade
from 1900 to 1910, from 1910 to 1920, and so on? At what point and in what
context did he set forth the specific theories which today are so central
to Analytical Psychology?
Aside from the answers to those questions, I discovered much I had not
anticipated.

At first blush, I realized how poorly R. F. C. Hull captured
Jung's "voice" in his English translations for The Collected Works. Reading
the first English translations of the writings, I came to appreciate Jung's
earlier translators: Beatrice Hinkle, Constance Long, M. D. and Edith Eder,
H. G. Baynes, Stanley Dell, and, perhaps the least acknowledged contributor
to the Jungian tradition, Cary Fink de Angulo Baynes. (Mrs. Baynes' most
popular translation is Richard Wilhelm's I Ching.(3) ) Through their
language, I rediscovered Jung's paradoxical combination of the utterly
earthy and the fantastically conceptual.

My chronological, decade-by-decade reading threw into sharp relief the
evolution of Jung's concepts. Jung would pick up an idea from somewhere,
anywhere, and integrate it into his model. He was an intellectual pack rat.

Heraclitus would be most surprised to have been credited with the term
enantiodromia, and Jung's concept of the "lowering of the threshold of
consciousness" bears little resemblance to Janet's abaissement du niveau
mental! (4) Yet, they all served as grist for Jung's milling of his psychology.

And mill ideas Jung did! Particularly during the years 1910 to 1930, he
tried first one way and then another of conceptualizing his experience. His
theory of archetypes is a telling example.
Beginning with Jakob Burckhardt's concept of primordial images in 1912
(Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido), Jung wrestled with the notion of
universal patterns for almost thirty years.(5) In 1917, he called them
"dominants of the supra-personal unconscious" (6) and "cosmic,
universally-human images."(7) When, in 1919, he hit upon the term,
archetype, Jung felt more comfortable attributing it to St. Augustine.(8)

In 1921, he briefly experimented with engram,(9) the Latin equivalent of
the Greek tupos (typos, "type"). Still, Augustine remained the reference
for the concept through the mid-1930's. (In 1948, Jung finally confessed,
"S. Augustinus does not use 'archetypus' as I once erroneously surmised . . ."(10)) In "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1934), Jung further
refined his thinking about universal images, distinguishing between
archetypes on one hand and Lvy-Bruhl's "collective representations" on the
other.(11) As late as "On the Nature of the Psyche" (1946), Jung felt
compelled to differentiate "archetype" from "archetypal image."(12)

I was struck by the extent to which Jung's psychology developed or evolved.

It did not emerge full blown--Athena-like--from Jung's mind. The typology
is a case in point.
Today, we know the typology as a construct of two attitude types--introvert
and extrovert--and four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and
intuition. Jung's first concept, though, of the typology was simply the
pair of opposites, extroversion and introversion.(13) Four years later--in
1917--he added thinking and feeling, but continued with a paired structure:
extroversion/feeling and introversion/thinking.(14) Only with Psychological
Types (1921), did he arrive at the two type, four function paradigm.(15)

Two other concepts which Jung developed during the period 1913-1921 bear
the stamp of the types and functions: archetypes and the transcendent
function. One might suspect that he was attempting a complete model of the
psyche with these structures. The only specific indication we have, though,
is from Kristine Mann's notes of the 1923 Cornwall Seminar. There Mann
reports Jung saying about the functions,
"'We can get horizontal orientation from these four modes. But vertical
orientation, i.e., the fourth dimension is time. That is growth, the
possibility of orientation in time. This is the 'transcendent finction'
[sic!]."(16)

How Jung imagined the archetypes might combine with the types and functions
and the transcendent function, we unfortunately will never know.

While there are numerous questions to which the Time Line does not provide
answers, it does offer an overview of Jung's theoretical development. It
simplifies, for instance, differentiating Jung's origins from Freudian
psychoanalysis. If concepts such as the dissociability of the psyche and
personification of psychic entities appear as early as 1902 in Jung's
writing, his completed model no more resembles Freud's than it does
Adler's. Nor did it find its origin in Freud. For Freud, the unconscious
was the psychopathological, polymorphous-perverse id. For Jung, the
collective unconscious was the very cornerstone and familiar spirit of the
individuation process.

Time Line

1902
Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena (17)

Historical Aspects
1.) Jung's doctoral dissertation
2.) influenced by and a defense of Flournoy's work, India to the Planet
Mars (1900)
3.) based on earlier, personal experience with his cousin, Helly Preiswerk

Historical Aspects
1.) during residency at Burgh÷lzli
2.) to provide control data for Bleuler's association studies with
schizophrenics
3.) within the framework of other association studies, i.e., Wundt,
Aschaffenburg
4.) within the philosophical framework of association versus dissociation
of ideas
5.) sent a copy to Freud

Historical Aspects
1.) Jung's second series of American lectures--presented at Fordham
University (1912)--subsequent to the 1909 trip with Freud
2.) a critical piece in Jung's differentiation of his psychology from
Freud's (27)

Theoretical Aspects
1.) energic differentiation from Freud-- psychic energy as quantitative,
not qualitative as per Freud's libido theory
2.) Jung's full elaboration of the distinctions between his model of the
psyche and Freud's
3. ) distinguishes between libido as exclusively sexual energy versus
libido as desire in general on the basis of his work with schizophrenia and
Freud's with hysteria
4.) identifies the purposive function of neurosis
5.) fundamental statement of Jung's theory of neurosis

1914
"The Psychology of Dreams" (28)

Theoretical Aspects
posits the compensatory function of dreams

1916
"The Transcendent Function" (29)

Historical Aspects
1.) written while on military service during WW I
2.) not published until 1957

Theoretical Aspects
1.) first resolution of the "problem of opposites," i.e., unifying function
of symbol- forming process
2.) first discussion of his "technique" for relating to unconscious
contents, i.e., active imagination, although did not use that term until
ca. 1935

1916
"Psychology of the Unconscious Processes" (30)

Historical Aspects
1.) revision of 1912, "New Paths in Psychology"
2.) precursor of the first of Two Essays (1928)

Theoretical Aspects
1.) teleological aspects of neurosis
2.) typology: extroversion linked with feeling, introversion with thinking
3.) distinction between the "personal" and the "impersonal" unconscious"
4.) Robert Mayer's "conservation of energy" applied to the psyche
5.) "absolute," "superpersonal," "collective" unconscious
6.) additional resolution of the "problem of opposites:"
enantiodromia--regulating function of antithesis
7.) transcendental (sic!) function mentioned for the first time in publication
8.) subject/object level of dream interpretation
9.) "dominants" of the super-personal unconscious (archetype precursor)
10.) "individuation" suggested by name

1917
"The Concept of the Unconscious" (31)

Historical Aspects
1.) first version of the second of Two Essays
2.) Jung's attempt to summarize his psychology

Theoretical Aspects
1.) differentiation between "personal" and the "impersonal" unconscious
2.) individuation
3.) persona as mask and "personality"
4.) intuition identified as a function, but not yet part of typological
structure

1919
"Instinct and the Unconscious" (32)

Theoretical Aspects
introduced the term "archetype" for the inherited patterns of human perception

1921
Psychological Types (33)

Historical Aspects
1.) completion of "psychology of consciousness" model
2.) never revised (added definition of "Self" in 1961)
3.) Jung considered it the final statement in his theory of psychic energy
4.) only work in The Collected Works not translated by R. F. C. Hull: H. G.
Baynes did the translation

Theoretical Aspects
1.) posits "unifying symbol" as the resolution of the "problem of opposites"
2.) elaborate discussion of opposites in wide variety of fields
3.) provides definitions of his terminology up to this point(34)
4.) advances a theory of conscious functioning (typology) as a spin-off of
his work on opposites

1928
"Commentary" in Wilhelm's Secret of the Golden Flower (35)

Historical Aspects
1.) culmination of his work (begun in early twenties) with Richard Wilhelm
and ex- ploration of Eastern spirituality
2.) first discussion of an "alchemical text" and a harbinger of his
theoretical direction over the next thirty years
3.) Jung's "Liverpool dream" (the flowering tree on an island in the middle
of a pond, in the middle of the city square) serves as imaginal evidence
for the notion of the Self and the significance of the mandala pattern

Theoretical Aspects
1.) finalizes his concept of the Self
2.) more detailed elaboration of approaching unconscious, the "technique"
(active imagination, still not mentioned by name)
3.) completes his working model of the psyche